Ripple, the First True Bitcoin Competitor

I don't know how anyone can call it a Bitcoin competitor.Instead of a proof of work decentralized consensus ripple depends on a consensus of _trusted servers_. In Bitcoin language ripple is distributed but not decentralized. Then multiply that out by the fact that its native currency XRP was all pre-created and given to the founders and their org... people like to call Bitcoin a ponzi scheme, but policies like this make me wonder if Ripple isn't a joke designed to point out the comparative equality Bitcoin provides. It might be more accurate to call it a paypal competitor but it retains the Bitcoin scalability challenge of requiring global synchronization, so its unlikely to be a great one.